Cancun and How Bad Things Aren’t Always Bad
I just got back from a great weekend in Cancun. Tried out an all-inclusive resort called Riu Palace Las Americas. From a value standpoint, you couldn’t beat it. It was barely more than $200 a night for a nice room all food and alcohol included. The food was pretty mediocre but I didn’t really go there for that. I’d imagine the price goes up a lot during the peak season, but who goes to Cancun the first weekend of December? Not many people, so there were some great deals.
Anyway, here are a couple of pics I snapped from the balcony of our room. We had, bar none, the best room on the whole property from a view standpoint. Top floor, dead center. Nice.
On the flight home I got to thinking about a story I wanted to share. I pulled my laptop out of my carry-on hoping to write this entry on the plane only to find that my laptop battery was dead. Bad beat. The day that Internet service is standard on commercial flights will be kind of disappointing to me. It seems like flights are the only time I am able to sit still and be alone with my thoughts without the temptation to get online. I usually feel so refreshed after traveling and I think a lot of the credit for this goes to the introspection that inevitably occurrs, for me anyway, when trapped in a metal box for hours with no connection to the outside world.
I started reading this book called Think and Grow Rich. It’s a pretty famous book but I’m not going to go into that now. If you want to know more about it, just click the link.
One point the book made is that sometimes what seems like bad news to us turns out to be a blessing in disguise. It reminded me of something that happened to me while I was in college.
I was a Criminology major (don’t ask) and sort of had a vague notion that I might like to be a police officer someday. The thought of wanting to be a police officer seems like a lifetime ago to me now, I think I was a completely different person back then.
But during college I was sort of heading towards a career as a uniformed officer. Ball State’s Criminology program required all majors to complete a field-internship (or take a particular number of extra courses). Most students did this internship in the summer after their Junior year.
The faculty member in charge of placing students with internships got me an interview with the Tampa Police Department. At the time, I was really big into skydiving and thought it might be fun to live in Florida for the summer while skydiving on the weekends.
Over spring break, I went to Tampa for my interview joined by three friends who liked the thought of being on a beach for the week.
Part of the interview required that I pass a polygraph examination. I didn’t think this would be a problem as I was very straight-laced back then. I had never tried a drug and could count the number of alcoholic drinks I had consumed on one hand (I would turn 21 a few months later).
At the conclusion of the polygraph examination, the gentleman who was conducting my interview (I guess the department threw him the unenviable job of dealing with potential interns) informed me that I had failed one of the questions. Surprised by this, I asked him which question. He informed me that I was lying to him when I said I had never tried marijuana.
Flustered, I insisted that I had never tried it. He told me, “Cory listen, it’s not a big deal, pretty much everyone has tried a toke once or twice, we just need you to admit it.” I was shocked. I had never tried marijuana in my life. Not once. I wasn’t about to admit to having tried it when I knew full well that I would be lying if I did so.
I was pretty shaken up. After all, I traveled all the way to Florida from Indiana at least partially because of this interview and now I was being told I didn’t pass a polygraph over something I was telling the truth on? I held my ground and explained to him that I really had never tried marijuana and that his machine is making a mistake. I don’t think he particularly cared to hear me say that.
He calmed me down and said the department would take everything into consideration and get back to me. A couple of weeks later, the internship director at Ball State informed me that the Tampa Police Department declined my request to work for them as an intern.
I couldn’t believe it. At the time, I really wanted that job. Sure, I could have taken an internship with a small department somewhere around Indiana, but that didn’t interest me at all. I wanted to see the interworkings of a huge department in an urban area. There were some logistical considerations that made Tampa very appealing to me (I had a friend that was going to let me house-sit his condo for the summer free of rent, without that offer I don’t think living in an urban area was on the table for me at the time).
With seemingly no outs left in the deck, I informed her that I would just take classes over the summer to meet the additional credit hour requirements placed upon those not doing an internship.
Looking back, I don’t know how I failed that polygraph, and although I didn’t realize it at the time, I would say now that it was one of the better strokes of luck I’ve ever had. I spent that summer in class three hours a day and used the rest of the time to improve my poker skills and work more closely with Poker Tips. I made my first trip to Vegas that summer as a spectator at the World Series of Poker. I was hooked. I found something that I knew I wanted to be involved in.
Five years later, I’m a part-owner of Poker Tips and have a lifestyle more comfortable than maybe every person I graduated with in the Criminology Department thanks to poker. If I had gotten that internship, there’s no telling how unfulfilled my life might be right now. The idea of being a police officer is nearly laughable to me at this point in my life. I’ve found a lot of happiness and inner peace on the path I’ve been on since failing that polygraph. I guess I can’t know for sure, but I think it’s incredibly unlikely that I would enjoy my life as much as I do now had the summer of 2005 gone the way I was hoping it would.
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i really like this post cory…keep going….i’ve been reading your blog on and off since you started it, and more frequentley latley, and i always enjoy the entrys….good job
-mike-